There is an interesting note in the Lancet for September 30 on the surgeon’s
chest retrieved from the wreck of Henry VIII’s flagship, the Mary Rose,
which sank in the Solent in 1545 after capsizing. The chest is now displayed
at the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth Dockyard, and represents a curious medical
armamentarium for the treatment of a crew of 700.
The chest is of walnut, with dovetailed joints, beech battens and elm handles.
When found it was in a small cabin on the main gundeck of the ship. Its accurate
construction is shown by the fact that air was still trapped inside it. The
content amounted to some 60 items, including rows of lidded wooden canisters,
ceramic medicine jars and a small, coloured glass bottle resembling those used
for smelling salts. One canister contained peppercorns.
Although the iron blades had corroded, turned wooden handles indicated the various
surgical instruments, including saws, cautery tools and bone gouges. There was
a wooden mallet, a sharpening stone, a urethral syringe, bone earpicks, leather
and pewter flasks and a leather purse with silver coins. Razors and a brass
shaving bowl with a crescentic rim indicated a barber. Forceps, spatulas and
fine-tooth combs were in the modern style, but a bone needle used for suturing
was large enough to suggest that wound repair was crude. Herbs and medicaments
found in dressings, poultices and jars have yet to be analysed, but one jar
containing ointment had been so well preserved that fingermarks could be seen
in it.